Morry Gash/AP Photo
Jill Mickelson helps a voter outside the Frank P. Zeidler Municipal Building, March 30, 2020, in Milwaukee. The city is now allowing drive-up early voting for the state’s April 7 election.
Despite national advisories for physical distancing to limit the spread of the coronavirus, Wisconsin voters are still scheduled to head to the polls for in-person voting in its presidential primary next Tuesday. And this will likely create significant hardships and threats to the integrity of the vote, according to materials from the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC).
An email from WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe notes that more than 100 jurisdictions statewide have reported a critical poll worker shortage, meaning that the jurisdiction cannot staff even one polling place in that area. Across the state, 779 juridictions reported some degree of poll worker shortages, while only 541 reported they had sufficient staffing prepared. An additional 530 juridictions did not report their staffing status. Typically, poll workers are older, and it can be difficult to get adequate staffing during a normal election cycle, let alone during a contagious pandemic that disproportionately affects the elderly.
As a result, Wisconsin has undertaken drastic polling place consolidations. The city of Milwaukee, which normally has 180 polling places open on Election Day, will have “10 to 12” on April 7. Milwaukee had 504,003 registered voters as of March 1, according to the WEC. Wolfe’s email also says there are no geographical trends in the staff shortages, which suggests that rural voters as well as those in urban hubs will be affected. Democratic Governor Tony Evers plans to call in the state National Guard to staff polling places if the shortages can’t be filled.
On Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge William Conley declined to postpone the election, but extended the deadline for absentee ballots to arrive at local clerks’ offices to April 13. The new deadline to request an absentee ballot is Friday, April 3, at 5 p.m.
Bernie Sanders called for Wisconsin to delay its primary in a statement, saying that “people should not be forced to put their lives on the line to vote.” Joe Biden also released a statement asking voters in Wisconsin to try the state’s vote-by-mail option, but in a videotaped answer to a reporter’s question, declined to call for the postponement of in-person voting, saying it “could be done” and would be for state officials to decide. Even the state Democratic Party, defying its own party’s governor, has called for postponement. But the election appears to be moving ahead.
Evers has claimed his hands are tied by legislative Republicans, but experts say he’s not been keen on a delay. “Both the governor and Republican leaders in the state legislature are in agreement that they want to keep the date as April 7 … It’s one of the only things that [they] agree on,” says Barry Burden, professor of political science and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I believe the governor and state legislature thought it would be better to take the known on April 7th, rather than the unknown situation that might happen some weeks later.”
The presidential primary tops the state ballot, followed by races for the U.S. House, statewide legislative offices, and an election that will seat one judge on the seven-member state Supreme Court. There are also races for mayors and county officials who have terms that expire in April, necessitating an election to replace them.
“One fear is that if the election was moved later there would be a Supreme Court seat vacancy and seats at the county and municipal levels, for things like school board and city council, that would be left vacant, or it would be unclear who the actual officeholder is,” says Burden. “I think not wanting to leave counties and cities without people in power was also a motivator to keep the election where it is.”
Gov. Evers suggested two weeks before Election Day that Wisconsin send all 3.3 million registered voters an absentee ballot. Republican State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos released a statement saying that would be logistically impossible to implement two weeks out from Election Day and would be an “invitation” to voter fraud. It would be a challenge for a state like Wisconsin with comparatively low vote-by-mail numbers to transition so rapidly to universal vote-by-mail, due to resources, time, and money. However, Vos’s claim that this could introduce more voter fraud was unsupported.
Even the state Democratic Party, defying its own party’s governor, has called for postponement. But the election appears to be moving ahead.
“That is not helpful and problematic,” says the ACLU of Wisconsin’s Chris Ott. “There’s much greater danger in voter suppression and whether it’s done deliberately or whether it’s just through the situation that we’re in right now where a lot of people are in self-isolation or things are changing and they’re not going to know what to do. We are in a very serious danger of losing a lot more votes.” Ott expects to field a deluge of calls from confused voters on Election Day.
Voters recognizing the risks to voting in person have requested absentee ballots ahead of Election Day in unprecedented numbers, with over one million applications. “Demand for absentee ballot envelopes remains unprecedented and 1,050,000 additional envelopes were recently ordered,” Wolfe says in her email, though she added that most envelopes would be “unlikely to arrive before the April 7th election.” The deadline to request an absentee ballot was Thursday, April 2.
The absentee voter system in Wisconsin is complex, with many ways a voter’s ballot could count toward the state’s error rate instead of their candidate of choice. Mailed-in ballots typically must contain the voter’s signature, a witness signature, and that witness’s address. The teleconference’s guidance on any ballots received that are missing any one of those elements is to reach out to the voter and inform them how to “remedy” their ballot before Election Day, when counting begins. But with high vote-by-mail demands and severe staff shortages, it’s unclear how that will be possible.
Judge Conley did cancel the witness signature and address requirement, but voters must provide written affirmation that they could not locate witnesses due to the coronavirus outbreak, adding a complexity to the process along with subtracting one.
Similar laws around special processes for absentee ballots lead to error rates across the country, and post-election reports show that people of color are more likely to have such an “error” in their ballots than others.
For voters still trying to obtain absentee ballots, there’s been confusion on how to satisfy the state’s voter ID law. In Madison, the county clerk tweeted that more than 1,100 requests could not be fulfilled because there wasn’t a voter ID on file. Half of those requests came from senior citizens. Some people sent in selfies to prove their identities in place of where the state wanted a pre-approved photo ID.
“There are people who are struggling technologically and otherwise to provide that ID under really trying circumstances,” says Mike Browne, deputy director of the progressive think tank One Wisconsin Now. “You may be a legal voter who doesn’t have an ID and, you know, try going to get one now. I think there are a lot of concerns [in this election], and this voter ID is certainly one of them.”
The absentee voter system in Wisconsin is complex, with many ways a voter’s ballot could count toward the state’s error rate instead of their candidate of choice.
Five states—Washington, Hawaii, Utah, Oregon, and Colorado—currently conduct universal vote-by-mail elections, but these programs have been transitioned into over years.
During the COVID-19 outbreak, the choice between an election with easy access to absentee ballots and one where voters must leave their homes and visit potentially crowded polling places could literally be seen as a life-or-death decision. Two poll workers in Broward County, Florida, tested positive for COVID-19 last week, days after volunteering in the election. But complete vote-by-mail elections can also hinder accessibility for people with disabilities and the visually impaired, Ott says.
“There’s no ideal election and some group is going to be aggrieved by whatever states do,” says Burden. “There will be voters who are inconvenienced and voters who may be stopped from voting altogether.”
